How common is this, really? I think you would have to weigh the chances of someone going through multiple specialists (psych evaluation, obgyn, possible other referrals) over the course of months and then magically they come to regret the procedure well into their full adulthood? At that point you might as well say that people shouldn’t be allowed cosmetic surgery, lasik, or braces.
It’s not common at all - on the contrary, the majority of ob-gyns have never seen a patient return and express regret about their voluntary sterilization, let alone know of one who was driven to suicide by it. I don’t know how this commenter came up with the idea.
Yes. In a sense, your behavior launders adtech’s poor reputation.
Think of it like this: what if I tried to argue with you “think of all the good we can do with the profits from the baby-pulping machine!” as an executive of the baby pulping company. Maybe I run a dog adoption agency with the profits, or a soup kitchen. I’m using acts of charity as a way to launder the horrific actions of my company.
I mean, you're doing an "appeal to extremes" argument here... And I think it's a bit more subtle.
Almost everything we do as a consumer or worker in a capitalist market is tied somewhere down the line to a generally-agreed undesirable outcome somehow.
So the really tricky part that involves using your brain and heart is figuring out where that line is.
(And it's sad that in large part our voice in the world's operations is reduced to mostly ineffective "buy or not buy" ... )
I would buy that a wealthy person would have the anger and the resources to learn how to stalk, make a plan, use a weapon. Poverty is a drain on your mental capacity for nearly everything else besides survival.
Also I don’t doubt that his mother would lack healthcare desperately even when wealthy. Women in pain are one the biggest demographics of denied healthcare. Even extremely wealthy, well-connected women.
So instead of using her money to find care elsewhere with a different company or even in a different country, he just decided to murder the CEO of the company that denied his coverage?
How absolutely insane does that sound?
My buddy was a pro hockey player. He retired and a few years later, he blew out his knee. He didn't have insurance and was in a lot of pain every day. He knew he couldn't afford a 25K bill for surgery so he got on a plane, flew to Argentina, got his surgery done, stayed for two weeks and flew back. The whole ordeal cost him around 8K for the whole deal.
Instead of plotting to kill the CEO of some healthcare company, he found a solution to his problem instead.
This is the difference between this guy and thousands of other people who are in chronic pain. Some smoke weed, some find treatments in other countries, some find homeopathic remedies and many other combinations therein. They don't just go off the deep end and plot to murder someone because they felt so wronged by a health care company.
What has he accomplished by doing what he did? Nothing. There's already been a video of the new CEO to employees about how they intend to stay the path of denying necessary treatments and expenditures. All of that pent up hate and anger and instead of channeling that into doing something positive for himself and his mother, he just took out on the CEO of a company instead.
As someone dealing with a similar health journey of loved ones as the killer's, it takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to finally come to the conclusion that the medical system as a whole isn't very helpful for certain conditions, before one takes treatment into their own hands.
Doctors fear of malpractice and pressure to fit in as many billable moments in a day means that there's really no deep "engineering" of someone's problems that doesn't fit neatly into their mental diagnostic flow chart. So it's presented as needing expensive diagnostic work, to which the insurance companies also put up their hoops. And doctors are also not trained in nutrition and its effect on chronic illness such as this shooter's mothers.
So what it ends up feeling like is that if only the insurance companies were efficient, we could have an efficient route to hope while the insurance companies block such efforts.
Healthcare in America is one of those areas where unintuitive solutions are needed, and I would argue that it starts at the lifestyle prevention level before it even gets to the medical doctors and insurance companies.
Look up neuropathy. I know someone suffering from it.
> What has he accomplished by doing what he did?
He accomplished that this particular CEO no longer goes to bed smugly each night, resting in wealth, while profiting of the suffering of others. It also made social media fun as it hasn't been in a long, long time. It's bringing all sorts of people together, wondering if they might not be so different after all. It's also causing a lot of people to get tattoos.
Probably more importantly, it causes all sorts of people to come out with stories about their or their loved ones' experiences with the health care system in the US.
Then there are all the news pieces where people in golden cages express shock at the pesky rabble celebrating. The pesky rabble notices and discusses that, too. They particularly notice the hypocrisy, how their lives are worth nothing, and how they once again are told what to think.
It put little a crack in the scheme of riling poor people up against each other, where there was no crack at all before.
What did your buddy achieve? He fixed his problem for 8k dollars which is still insane considering health should not be for profit. And if he wouldn't have have had 8k, he maybe would have just stayed in pain with a weed addiction, but at least he didn't become a murderer. Good for him, but if he wants to sit here and judge this dude for losing it after what his mother went through, let him speak for himself maybe.
So you acknowledge a problem and think it’s perfectly acceptable to have our healthcare broken and using some other country’s resources is an ok substitute? Laughable. And this isn’t even getting into all of the denied cases under the direction of this CEO for actual insurance that is supposed to cover you. Kids not getting cancer meds. Give me a break.
How does your buddy feel about the shooter, given his experience with the medical system? Would he approve of you using him as an example of why an elderly woman with a severe, largely untreated nervous system chronic illness, which cannot be solved by any one procedure domestically or abroad, should just fix herself somehow?
This reads very “I have black a black friend, so I can speak on race issues”.
>> How does your buddy feel about the shooter, given his experience with the medical system?
He's already said he would never support what he did, regardless of what happened to him or how he was treated.
>> Would he approve of you using him as an example of why an elderly woman with a severe, largely untreated nervous system chronic illness, which cannot be solved by any one procedure domestically or abroad, should just fix herself somehow?
He's already told multiple people in multiple conversations I've been around him that he felt compelled to leave the country to get treatment because the system is so broke here. I don't need his approval or permission to use his experience.
Its been widely reported the shooters family is wealthy. With such financial resources, both the shooter and his mom could've easily sought treatment elsewhere, but did not. Apparently people don't like the idea that life is hard and sometimes caring for your loved ones isn't easy, is time consuming and takes a lot of energy to endure.
Its clear the shooter decided he didn't have the constitution to do something different and instead of taking the decision process out of UHC's hands and do something himself to help his family, he merely acquiesced to what UHC was doing until he decided he needed to murder the CEO of the company.
>> This reads very “I have black a black friend, so I can speak on race issues”.
"Those who preach about tolerance and acceptance rarely, if ever, practice it themselves."
Thanks for confirming this is your level of discourse.
> I don't need his approval or permission to use his experience.
But you are using his experience to justify your own positions. I’m just pointing out that you’re merely speaking from authority that you don’t have just because you know some guy. That’s your dismissal speaking from a position of assumed knowledge you don’t actually have.
Also, it’s strange you consider polite disagreement to be intolerance. I’m not shooting you or advocating violence, I’m merely saying I think your logic is dumb. That you seem to equate the two the level of discourse you are bringing, not me.
I think that is a new and interesting protagonist tbh. So many are heros or have to develop into heroism. It’s refreshing to just have someone who explicitly doesn’t save the world or similar stakes.
Maybe the pop culture obsession is new, but the snarky, reluctant protagonist is something I have seen enough to be kind of tired of. Off the top of my head, Murderbot also reminds me of the protagonist of Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City which I recently read.
If you enjoyed Murderbot, take that as a recommendation, although it is less sci-fi and more historical fiction.
Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City has a protagonist who is reluctant but is forced to face huge stakes, namely the fall of a city at war. Murderbot is interesting for more than its reluctance: the stakes are distinctly different and far more about introspection and self actualization.
Orhan is quite different though - he's a braggart unreliably narrating his own story after most of the events have transpired. You can't believe his reluctance, it's a show he's putting on to make himself look better. The entire story feels like it too, credit to the author.
Murderbot is not that. What you see of them is as genuine as their perspective can be. Murderbot may be snarky, but it doesn't have the same braggadocious air, and I do think that changes the character and story significantly. And if you're a similar kind of neuro-atypical then it can be a refreshing bit of heroic representation.
I will give Sixteen Ways some credit though - at least it ended. I don't particularly like the ending, but it is one. Murderbot falls off hard by the time the series gets to full length novels.
While I liked it for what it is, the reluctant antihero isn’t exactly a new concept, other than possibly in the present aspect of being a semi-autistic robot/AI.
Fast fashion clothing increasingly cannot be ironed. But also it’s increasingly hard to buy good quality clothes because of the influence of fast fashion. Even very expensive designers will have shit like unlined coats or thin sweaters. Part of this is that the supply chain for good quality clothing has been greatly reduced. Even if you wanted as a designer to acquire good quality fabric, you have to pay more for it than you used to.
That’s a fault of the existing teammates. I always prioritize 1:1 with new members in my team or my sister teams and make myself available for any onboarding or technical questions.
> Exactly - 12 years of education to get children ready to be citizens and not single class on how to manage a bank account, or even the most basic education about investments or actual wealth building.
I kind of disagree with this. At least in my high school this was definitely taught, but at the time we were all dumb 14-17 year olds who didn’t care about any of that stuff we just wanted to know what is needed to get an A and then forget about it, and that was the good students!
A problem about teaching life stuff in schools is that I don’t think many of the teenagers in high school are in a place where they can absorb that stuff long enough for it to be relevant many years later.
I really don't understand the people who complain that they weren't taught about debt and loans and checking accounts. You were given a 6th grade math education, and you were taught how to read. High school classes cannot be expected to teach every possible circumstance or decision you'll find yourself in. At some point you have to self-start.
realistically, the complaint isn't about lack of things being taught at school (tho it's framed that way).
The real complaint is the lack of being told exactly what to do that leads to a path of automatic success. What they were told to do did not lead to automatic success, but is in fact, fraught with traps and dangers, most of which is avoidable but only for those with the foresight.
But i am a believer of personal responsibility, and that following the crowd (or common advice) without thinking critically about it will merely lead sheep to slaughter.
you can teach someone about financial concepts, without having the actual monies. These are not physical activities requiring actual mediums like driving or swimming. They are mental concepts - an extension of critical thinking and maths, with a bit of instruction following mixed in.
Good luck. In math, it's extremely difficult to teach the mental concepts and critical thinking. Unless you have a gifted teacher, most schools just teach you rote memorization and solving countless duplicate problems that use the same technique.
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